OCCUPIED JERUSALEM —
Israeli police prevented hundreds of Jewish ultra-nationalist protesters from approaching
Jerusalem’s Muslim quarter on Wednesday to prevent more violence after weeks of
tensions.
اضافة اعلان
More than a thousand ultra-nationalist demonstrators
carrying Israeli flags gathered in the early evening in a square outside the
Old City.
The police blocked hundreds of protestors from
reaching Damascus Gate, which is the main entrance to the Muslim quarter of the
city, according to AFP teams at the site.
Tensions have spiked in Israeli-occupied east
Jerusalem amid nearly a month of deadly violence in Israel and the occupied
West Bank, with the
Jewish Passover festival coinciding with the Muslim holy
month of Ramadan.
“We want to go to all of Jerusalem and our
government is not letting us,” said Pnina, a 62-year-old civil servant.
Among the demonstrators were supporters of far-right
lawmaker Itamar Ben Gvir, a controversial opposition politician. Some
demonstrators shouted “death to the Arabs”.
Ben Gvir himself had been barred from the area
earlier in the day by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
“I have no intention of allowing petty politics to
endanger human lives,” Bennett said in a statement. He said he would not allow
Gvir’s “political provocation” endanger Israeli occupation forces. “Bennett,
coalition security is not state security,” Ben Gvir responded on Twitter.
Bennett, himself a right-winger and a key figure in
Israel’s settlement movement, leads an ideologically divided coalition
government.
Earlier this month, his coalition lost its one-seat
majority in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel’s parliament, after a member left in a
dispute over the use of leavened bread products in hospitals during Passover.
Then on Sunday, the Raam party, drawn from the
country’s Arab-Israeli minority, suspended its support for the coalition
following violence in and around the
Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, where clashes
between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli forces left more than 170 injured
on Friday and Sunday.
Meanwhile, right-wing lawmakers are under pressure
to quit the government, which is seen by some on the Israeli right as being too
favorable to Palestinians and Israel’s Arab minority.
UN Secretary-Genera
l Antonio Guterres said he was
“deeply concerned by the deteriorating situation in Jerusalem” and is in
contact with parties to press them “to do all they can to lower tensions, avoid
inflammatory actions and rhetoric,” according to a statement by his
spokesperson in New York.
Last year, escalations in Jerusalem lead to an
11-day Israeli war on Gaza.
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